Breeding Limitation

One line that stuck out to me, especially after listening to Marilyn Manson’s reading, was “He who desires but acts not, breeds pestilence,” (5). When reading this line, I picture a man who is reaching for unobtainable things that he can never seem to grasp. The desires of this man are on the tips of his fingers, but he never acts to fully capture them. This line depicts images of hope along with defeat. Blake criticizes the man for never acting on his desires, because a person who only desires but not acts is like a rabbit on a wheel. The comparison of desire and action contradict themselves in this setting. The man can never obtain the desire due to a lack of action because he lacks motion. He fails to continue forward in life, never obtaining anything unique. Desire and action work as direct opposites because they never connect. However desire and action work together to form equilibrium. Societal desires are never fulfilled because nobody acts on these desires, which causes “pestilence.” After researching the term pestilence, I found that it refers to a deadly disease. Disease symbolizes limitation, especially in this line. The lack of action breeds limitation causing the cycle of repetition and contraries. Society will never transform into anything because of this limitation. It challenges us to question everything and to act on everything because of the possible outcomes. In this line, the first half represents the “good” and the latter part symbolizes the “bad.” Without action (“good”), there is no “bad.” As previously mentioned, these terms need to both exist to work together and create change despite difference.

By Brieanna Anderson

Apples and Oranges

“a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (Blake, line 8). This Proverb from Hell refers to two types of men; one who’s a fool and one who is wise. It also mentions a tree. In some religions, trees symbolize enlightenment, and in others they symbolize knowledge. In general, trees represent life and growth. With this knowledge, along with what I know of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, I gather the wise man is who we should strive to be. Foolish people are those who do not think beyond what they know. What they are told. They see a tree and take it for what it is. Not what it can provide. A wise person will look at a tree and see that it gives us food, such as apples or oranges. They will see the tree provides them shade underneath the torturous sun. They will appreciate the beauty, trees and other nature add to the world. A wise person never truly knows anything. They are always learning. Always seeing things not as they are, but what they can become. At its core, this Proverb, encourages us to challenge everything we know. To never stop acquiring knowledge. A fool would imagine Heaven and Hell and think of good and evil. This is the contraries we speak of in class. The contraries, Blake argues, is how we progress. After all, how can we have good, if there is no evil, and vice versa? But, as the Proverb encourages, we must move beyond this. True they are opposites, but we must not allow our preconceived notions of Heaven and Hell become stagnant. We must rid ourselves of any previous thoughts or opinions we have of the two places. There is much we can learn from Hell, just as we can learn from Heaven. It is not a place of doom, but of wisdom and lessons to be learned. Hell will not drag you under, but raise you up, and challenge everything you know. Both Heaven and Hell offer knowledge for growth. If we forbade ourselves from learning more, we become the fool, and miss out on life’s apples and oranges. We just get the branch.

Bella Cortez

God is a Woman

Why does Milton need to “go down self annihilation and eternal death” ?(book 1, plate 15, line 22; page 162)

 

William Blake and Milton share views based upon spirituality and sexuality that explores realms of the self with God. However, in Blake’s  “Milton: Book 1, plate 2, lines 1-24; page 148) it discusses about Milton’s own poetic genius, yet in the form of a woman. In other words, Milton needs to deconstruct the self and reevaluate one’s life in order to recognize the truth or lies behind religion. Specifically, Milton needs to find whether God is even a man or a woman.  Milton’s implication of the poetic genius as the woman begins in lines 1-2. For example, Milton states “Daughters of Beulah! Muses who inspire the Poet’s Song Record the journey of immortal Milton thro’ your realms” (148). Here, Milton calls upon the daughters of Beulah who do not descend from heaven, but from the poet’s brain. Also, these women are seen as religious, yet do not associate with religion rather are a source of inspiration for the poetic genius. Lines 18-19 state “Unhappy tho in heav’n, he obey’d, he murmur’d not, he was silent Viewing his Sixfold Emanation scatter’d thro’ the deep” (149). Here, it discusses about Milton’s unhappiness about attending and participating in religion. However, this demonstrates that Milton was annoyed or bothered by the repetitive sermon and religious ideals he had to follow. Milton didn’t have a perspective nor opinion, but fulfilled the requirements to enter the gates of heaven. He acknowledged that his family was entangled by the ideologies that surrounded their lives. The poetic genius within one was trapped by the religious testimonies of another man. In addition, Milton states, “Terrific among the Sons of Albion in chorus solemn & loud Bard broke forth! All sat attentive to the awful man” (149). Here, Milton uses sarcasm by explaining the “terrific” chorus, which is not terrific but annoying. The “awful man” is the preacher whom Milton needs to listen, obey, and follow their religious ideals. Yet, this “awful man” could reference the political and religious ideologies that made humans believe that God is a man. Milton is unsatisfied by the sermons that are given in church because he questions the ideologies about the truth of religion. How can one know that this “preacher” or “bible” is even true? How can one even find the truth? These are questions that Milton is implying throughout the stanza because as a poetic genius he needs to dig deeper into the realm of religion. Most importantly, Milton needs to go down self annihilation and eternal death to reconstruct one’s self and detach from ideologies. Therefore, Milton certainly implies that God may be a woman.

-Priscilla Ortega

Visual Representation of Philosophy

The passage “The Voice of the Devil” from William Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,engages Moravian images, themes and ideas. According to Marsha Keith Schuchard in “Young William Blake and the Moravian Tradition of Visual Art, the theme that the word should “choose Fancy rather than Philosophy” because it is separate reason in philosophy that is harmful and it “makes us lose ourselves” (85). By using the set up for the voice of the devil with numbers it is set up like a philosophical argument or a logical proof. From the images shown in the scholarly article, I think 2. “Adam Kadmon” and 4. “Der Christen ABC (1750), frontispiece” most represented the chosen passage from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The reason for “Adam Kadmon” is because when you look at this image it evokes the contrary “Man has no body distinct from his soul for that call’d body is a portion of soul discerned by the five Senses, the chief inlets of soul in this age” (Blake 70) from the passage; this further dives into the theme of how “the Holy Spirit is female” where the soul is separate from the body and she being the mother of Jesus and the wife of God she is never spoken of (Schuchard 87). We tend to focus on the themes of God the father and Jesus with his crucifixion a bloody theme the Moravians focused on. Therefore, the focus of the soul being separate and not focused on would eliminate a central theme of bloodiness. The reason I believe 4. “Der Christen ABC (1750), frontispiece” is an image that best represents my chosen passage is because of the quote after this image which is “makes ethical and religious truths accessible to all” which relates to how in The Voice of the Devil, it is stated “Energy is the only life and is from the Body, and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy” (Schuchard 90, Blake 70). Where the contraries are true whereas the beginning is false; therefore, invalid. By the image the theme of the energy is piercing through the sky with the bird falling. In my opinion the bird in the image is the devil falling from Heaven and losing his grace to become Satan in Hell.

-Alina Cantero

 

Schuchard, Marsha Keith. “Volume 40 · Issue 3.” Blake/An Illustrated Quarterly, http://bq.blakearchive.org/40.3.schuchard.

 

 

 

 

Was Manson Eliminating Noah?

One of the proverbs that particularly stuck out to me was, “The rat, the mouse, the fox, the rabbet watch the roots; the lion, the tyger, the horse, the elephant watch the fruits” (72). The reason for this is because of the relations to the themes of “good” and “evil” being demonstrated. When you think of animals such as rats, mice, one’s mind tends to lean towards words that Blake took out of some of The Songs of Experience, like the word dirty. With this relation to the word dirty, one may think of things closer to the ground, i.e. Hell and the Devil. When thinking about animals such as elephants and lions one who is versed in the Bible may think of Noah’s Ark. God placed lions and other animals of the ferocious nature on board in order to guard them from wicked ones who attempted to stop them from entering the ark.  When watching the Marilyn Manson video of The Proverbs Of Hell, one thing I noticed was that Manson did not recite the entire proverbs in our copy of Blake’s Poetry and Designs. I found it interesting that he chose to skip over the proverb that I found so intriguing. After reading all of the proverbs and listening to Manson eliminating my chosen proverb but still speaking the one prior to it, “what is now proved was once, only imagin’d” unease’s me. If he were to speak both it would demonstrate a better connection to what is going on, such that my example of Noah’s Ark would correlate more. It was once only imagin’d by God and then was proven after Noah brought upon the animals with the help of God. By having the music in the background of Manson’s reading ignited a sort of chilling aspect which implied a contradictory tone to the genre of “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” because of how the tones would change between the lines about God, where it would be a slightly higher (uplifting) tone and the lines not stated with God in it being a slightly deeper (dragging) tone. This relates back to the differentiating of Heaven and Hell but needing one to distinguish the other.

-Alina Cantero

The CLOD and the PEBBLE: Experimenting with Contraries

 

In Songs of Experience, Blake narrates a debate about love between two natural elements in the poem “The CLOD and the PEBBLE.” Divided into three four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter, the poem first opines the perspective that love is selfless and capable of creating “a Heaven in Hells despair” (4). Functioning as a transition, the second stanza identifies the previous speaker as the clod of clay, which is described as little, trodden, and singing—all images associated with innocence (think, “Little Lamb who made thee…Gave thee such a tender voice…He is meek”). At the exact middle of the poem, Blake shifts to the second natural element, a “Pebble of the brook,” marking the departure with a colon at the end of line 6. Presented as a direct contrary to the clod, the pebble asserts in stanza three that love is selfish, defiantly building “a Hell in Heavens despite” (12).

Although Blake strictly separates the clod and the pebble through poetic form, he refuses to accept their complete animosity and emphasizes their natural origins. The definer “clay” is meaningful to Blake (it appeared in his first draft of “The Tyger” as well) because it connotes malleability and incompleteness, much like an impressionable child. Though the pebble has been hardened by the constant bombardment of the brook, it is near enough to the clod to hear its song, indicating the imaged locales of Heaven and Hell exist in the same physical space. Blake also uses the same rhyme of “please” and “ease” in the first and third stanzas, undermining disparate opinions through diction. By binding together the seemingly apparent oppositions of the clod and the pebble, Blake questions the absoluteness of the divides between innocence and experience, youth and adulthood, Heaven and Hell, by highlighting characteristics shared by each pair.